Tech cos will need to scale up to face data explosion: Dell EVP

Cities across the world may generate 200 times more data over the next three-five years, resulting in a data disruption for technology services companies, a top executive at Dell Technologies said, prompting companies to reimagine the scale of their capacities to handle the data explosion.

“Singapore as a city from an e-governance perspective is handling one petabytes per day. And, in three years, it will be a little over 200 petabytes per day,” Amit Midha, executive vice president, Global Digital Cities, told ET in an interview. “One of the customers came to us and said they want to have a gravity wave application launched. And the data feed they will have from that in 2023 is one petabytes per second…”

Exponential growth of data would be seen in areas such as genome sequencing and checking for gravity waves.

The scope for data analytics would grow significantly with increasing use of digital services by consumers, Midha said, adding nearly 10% of the overall data available across varied industry sectors is analysed currently.

“And, today, we do analysis on only about 10% of the data. And, I think no matter how you use the data, whether it's artificial intelligence, you know, or in terms of more data driven or smarter products, or digital cities or smart cities, whichever we use it...so compounding effect of data doubling requires a new type of architecture to support this explosive growth in the data and the computer requirements,” he said.

“And these requirements are not going to slow down, they will continue just because businesses are going to say ‘how do I make my product differentiated using data?”

Midha, who drives the smart city business sector for Dell Technologies, said the core technologies would see “dramatic changes”.

“What we are seeing is core technologies getting in place new outcomes in biology, in materials, in energy, in better living, (and) all of this will be possible in the coming days. So, I think data is going to be the currency... technology will change pretty dramatically within our industry to support that,” said Midha, who is also President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Commercial, at Dell.

The company said it is pivoting itself from a hardware focused company to digital transformation services as it sees increasing business opportunities in that domain. “We are the essential infrastructure company for digital future,” said Midha.

A majority of the businesses (45%) across industry sectors believe their business models would not remain relevant, nor have the talent to make that shift, the company found through a survey.